bnralt

58 ms·

601.
by bnralt 6y ago
A car making a right turn is also going to be a lot more dangerous situation when there are bike lines than if the bicycles are sharing lanes with cars. I was curious about how it's handled in Copenhagen (since that is usually held up
602.
by bnralt 6y ago
I've seen a decent amount of evidence suggesting that hunter-gatherer societies are generally quite a bit happier than members of modern society (here's an example of an article discussing this[1]). I think we often make the assum
603.
by bnralt 6y ago
> How can we vote or make decisions on trends if everyone is only reacting to major events? I've seen a lot of people who decided years ago that they were never voting for Trump spend the last 5 years obsessing daily over every news
604.
by bnralt 6y ago
> I think this view is fairly American centric. Go to any bar in Tokyo and you will be given an ashtray to smoke cigarettes with your drink. From March this year: "Japan’s ban on smoking inside restaurants and bars takes effect this
605.
by bnralt 6y ago
People have been smoking (in various ways) for thousands of years, yet there has been a substantial shift over the past few decades as to how prevalent it should be in our society. Smoking inside restaurants was common just a few decades ag
606.
by bnralt 6y ago
What's interesting is that alcohol will probably kill far more people this decade than Covid or opioids, yet very little attention gets paid to this. It's an enormous negative influence on our society, yet there's a lot of so
607.
by bnralt 6y ago
I think you're post was pretty clear. "Some people argue that X, but the data doesn't support X." Sometimes there can be a tendency for people to skim posts and try to quickly box people into Team A or Team B. It's
608.
by bnralt 6y ago
> There are significant military applications to our space program. It's interesting looking at the military and space, since the military seems to be more objective focused than NASA. Early on (1960's), the military was planni
609.
by bnralt 6y ago
Perhaps the problem was deciding that the U.S. needed to have a super-heavy lift capability in the first place. A lot of the U.S. space program seems to be rather aimless, doing things because they seem cool rather than practical. We should
610.
by bnralt 6y ago
> let's be honest if there was a good alternative we would already be using it No one's using the SMR's that are proposed here either. They're hoping to get the first one online in 10 years. A lot of nuclear fans get
611.
by bnralt 6y ago
I don't think many vote based on issues. A lot of the time, people seem to choose the candidate/community around the candidate first, then support whatever issues go with it. Even when people say they're really excited about
612.
by bnralt 6y ago
One of the things that's always thrown me off about the LessWrong community (I assume this article is adjacent to it because of the mention of Yudkowsky and the "I too have cognitive biases" confession) is that members suppos
613.
by bnralt 6y ago
> Lots of people have never even heard of fellow dwarf planet Ceres, but it spent almost as long as a full fledged planet as Pluto. Well, if the original IAU proposal for the definition of planet had gone through in 2006, not only would
614.
by bnralt 6y ago
If you want to simply take a utilitarian point of view, a single vote has never decided a presidential election before, and it's unlikely it ever will. An individual who votes for a third party is throwing away their vote in the same w
615.
by bnralt 6y ago
Print media and public stations don't have the same high-strung presentation that cable news does, but the actual substance isn't much better in my experience. The last few times I listened to NPR they seemed to be pretty deep int
616.
by bnralt 6y ago
Indeed. Someone recently linked to an article that does a pretty good job of going over the massive infrastructure costs[1]. The U.S. also has relatively well funded education[2]. I think many of the comments here reflect one of the reasons
617.
by bnralt 6y ago
> But you have to come up with something, otherwise you'll never cancel anything, by extension, never have room to invest in shows that could drive your subscriptions. Well, positive reception is probably a good indicator of somethi
618.
by bnralt 6y ago
Even with all their metrics, all they can do is guess. Their revenue comes from subscriptions, and there is no clear correlation between the amount of views an individual show gets and the amount of subscriptions Netflix has. You can't
619.
by bnralt 6y ago
> They look at spreadsheets all day long, and they see that some money losing piece of culture is preventing the business from creating non-money losing piece of culture ... or making payroll. In this case they're seeing something t
620.
by bnralt 6y ago
Our current system is kind of strange when you stop and think about it. We're OK with foreigners doing much of the labor for lower wages - as long as they do it overseas, and then ship the products here. However, if you think about it,
621.
by bnralt 6y ago
Indeed, Pluto is an interesting one for a number of reasons. One is that much of the commotion came from the fact that the word planet is very much a cultural concept, and a scientific body was attempting to redefine the word for everyone.
622.
by bnralt 6y ago
Thanks, this is a great read[1]. The incuriosity he sees as the reason why nothing is done is something I've seen a lot of, and have been thinking more and more about. As he notes, it's not just lack of interest in making things b
623.
by bnralt 6y ago
There are a lot of issues with the upvote/downvote concept: 1. It favors people who are more careless with their votes. If pro-Coke users only downvote poor comments and upvote well crafted ones regardless of beverage choice, and pro-P
624.
by bnralt 6y ago
Indeed. One city nearby was spending ~$4,500 a month to feed and house families, but the conditions were fairly horrible (dilapidated shelters with communal bathrooms, poor food quality). Simply handing the families the cash would have been
625.
by bnralt 6y ago
People still pursue their own interests, but usually it's outside of a university setting. Mixing these things with job training and then siloing them into an expensive and overly bureaucratic[1] system called "college" is of
626.
by bnralt 6y ago
Indeed, we shouldn't have this huge discrepancy between training to get a job and training once one has a job. There's also a lot of advantages to having a diverse group of individuals rather than separating people out into age co
627.
by bnralt 6y ago
Another way, which would solve other problems as well, would simply be to uncouple credentials and education, and require any institution that receives federal funding to open the credentialing to everyone. Just as anyone who meets the requ
628.
by bnralt 6y ago
Soda creates a much bigger burden on those programs as well. Much of the food industry does, as well as the alcohol industry and the entertainment industry (encouraging sedentary lifestyles). These things have a much bigger impact than a gu
629.
by bnralt 6y ago
There have actually been a lot of really good independent audio dramas in recent years. To name just a few: Edict Zero - A police procedural on a far flung colony planet. Orphans - A group of people with no memory crash land on a mysterious
630.
by bnralt 6y ago
The other problem with most online communities is that there's almost no limit on output. All else being equal, someone with an active offline life is going to have a smaller presence than someone who's terminally online, someone

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